martedì 10 marzo 2015

Tardi, Norwegian artist Pushwagner, Cowboy
Henk, the duo Goblet-Pfeiffer andThe
Swiss Art of Rockare the
main themes of the new edition of Fumetto Festival, from Saturday 7 March until
Sunday 15 March in Lucerne. The International Comix-Festival is happening far
and wide in the Swiss city, with a small comic market and a long row of awesome
exhibitions perfectly set up in museums, industrial spaces, hotels, galleries,
historical buildings and so on. In this post I'm proposing a photo gallery of
my two days in the country of Carl Gustav Jung, Stéphane Chapuisat and
Ursula Andress, beginning with some pictures I made on the way to the festival
and absolutely not related to comics...

And so I arrived at the Small Press Heaven,
in the central Kornschütte, the core of the show and a place where about twenty
exhibitors from different European countries can sell their self-produced
comics, while Analph bookshop from Zurich provides a good choice of books from
all over the world. The list of past weekend exhibitors included Ampel
Magazine, B.ü.L.b Comix,
Centrala, Hécatombe, Hollow Press, kuš!,
Misma and many others. New publishers and creators will be in Lucerne next
weekend (names availablehere).

Speaking of the exhibitions, the
retrospective about Tardi is absolutely the most significant and also striking.
The Neubad, a former swimming pool with an industrial feeling, hosts the most
comprehensive collection to date of Tardi's original artworks, from the comics
about the First World War to the adaptations of French crime stories by Malet
and Manchette, with the beautiful work made on the reconstruction of Paris,
with its buildings, bridges, shadows and rain. There were also pages fromLe Cri du peuple series,
from the book Ici Même written by Barbarella's creator
Jean-Claude Forest and obviously from the adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
(included the first episode Adèle et la bête, dated 1976), one of
the milestone of adventure comics. Tardi is one of the special guests of
the show with the musical comic readingPutain de guerrenext Friday 13 March and he'll also do a session of
signings Saturday 14 March.

Another special guest is Norwegian pop
artist Pushwagner, with a stunning exhibition at Kunstmuseum, mostly centred onSoft City, a comic masterpiece
from the Seventies. This is an extraordinary parable about human existence
depicted through the regular day of a man like many others. The themes of
conformism, capitalism and control are rendered with detailed illustrations of
lines and lines of men caught in their obsessive daily routine, while rows of
cars and buildings communicate a sense of claustrophobia and oppression.
Unfortunately I couldn't take pictures in the museum, so I'll post some photos
from the other exhibitions, as the two events dedicated to Cowboy Henk,
the extremely funny and widely imitated cult figure created by Belgian
cartoonists Kamagurka and Herr Seele (the latter, another special guest
of Fumetto, is meeting visitors at Hotel Schweizerhof in the days of the
show).

The set-up of the exhibition about
Dominique Goblet and Kai Pfeiffer is also very remarkable. The two creators
published the graphic novel Plus si ententefor Fremok last year, a
story centred on a mother who, after a divorce, spends her days on
dating websites. This key idea is well represented in the main room, where
drawings become an installation, a sort of "garden of love" populated
by personal ads, profiles, faces, objects and sounds from the potential
partners of the woman. The original artworks from the comic, characterized by
the versatility of styles and techniques, are exposed in an equally interesting
second room.

The Kunsthalle hosts Die Not Hat
Ein Ende - The Swiss Art of Rock, an exploration of the symbiosis between
graphics and rock music in Switzerland through the works of 19 Swiss designers
and artists who made LP covers, concert posters, flyers and illustrations for
prog, hard rock, punk, new wave and noise bands, from H.R. Giger to Cédric
Magnin, from Dirk Bonsma to many others.

For further informations about the
festival and the other exhibitions, you can visit thewebsiteand theFacebook pageof Fumetto, where you can also find a lot of pictures
documenting the first days of the event.

domenica 1 marzo 2015

The Italian Hollow Press is back but this time the news isn't about the new issue of Under Dark Weird Fantasy Grounds (scheduled for the beginning of April) but about two new publications both from Japanese artists debuting at the Fumetto Festival in Luzern next 7 and 8 March. The new books are Industrial Revolution and World War by Shintaro Kago, a new entry in Hollow Press roster, and Tetsupendium Tawarapedia by Tetsunori Tawaraya, already published in UDWFG.

Kago's book is a dystopian nightmare where man is reduced to a machine, the brain is only a way to command him and his body a weapon, while two alien factions battle in an architecturally majestic scenery. Bodies mingle with buildings, violence with sex, horror with humor in the typical Kago's style. Industrial Revolution and World War is an A4 book, 32 pages with hardcover, limited edition of 350 copies. The pre-order is 15% off until 11 March at the Hollow Press website, where you can also buy the original artworks.

Tetsupendium Tawarapedia collects the best of Tetsunori Tawaraya's work from 2002 to 2012. If I have defined his style in UDWFG as an "underground pointillism", this time he uses a wider array of solutions. The long sequence of illustrations and short comics highlights the stylistic growth of the Japanese cartoonist, so that the reader can become more familiar with his mutant nightmares, populated by winged creatures, deconstructed human figures, monoliths, zombies, skulls, children with too many arms and legs.

The mood is very different from Kago's book, but there is a work on the human body, redefined and sometimes brutalized, that is similar in both these new books from Hollow Press. Even the Tetsupendium - 400 pages in black and white, A5 format, limited edition of 500 copies - is available at a special pre-order price until 11 March.